Decrying shifting norms: towards a codification of societal ethos in Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo's Heart Songs

Title: Decrying shifting norms: towards a codification of societal ethos in Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo's Heart Songs
Author: Akingbe, Niyi
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2013, vol. 39, iss. 1, pp. [149]-165
Extent
[149]-165
  • ISSN
    0524-6881 (print)
    1805-0867 (online)
Type: Article
Language
License: Not specified license
 

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Abstract(s)
Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo's literary forte in the last ten years has undoubtedly been fiction, but Heart Songs is her first collection of poems. In this collection, she takes on the roles of social commentator and crusader through the conduit of orature, to criticize the devaluation of cultural and societal norms. The Poetics of Heart Songs is imbued with: the lamentation of the dearth of moral and social values in Nigerian society; the actual but often unspoken degradation of Nigerian immigrants in Europe and America, and the frequency with which corrupt practices have undermined the nation's development. This paper examines how Heart Songs canvasses for a re-examination of societal ethos, which demands that Nigeria's present must settle with the past by recovering social, moral and cultural codes for the restoration of human dignity.
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